Ghosts of Chablis

Jimbo. Jimmy. Jim. If I described you as Ireland’s answer to John Belushi, I wouldn’t be far wrong. And although you were never an actor, your entire life was the stuff of movie legend.

Rightly proud of your Irish heritage, you travelled and lived across the globe, and in the years before your untimely death you built a house in Westport, County Mayo, rediscovering your ancestral roots, and you became a legend there too.

I could write about our “sentences” together on London building sites. Remember that big job at the Barbican Centre in 1982? When it rained, we’d muster under the half-built tiered concrete structures to shelter and chat and lark. One day, in a minimally prepared “show” (with me as stage assistant to your eccentric performer), you wedged the handle of a shovel into your groin and began pogo-ing about. Hard enough, and I could never do it. But wait … then you raised your arms above your head and continued pogo-ing on the blade of the shovel. Wait again … then I’d pass you a yard broom and you’d pogo about the concrete, sweeping the ground as you went. Still can’t get my head around that. Two different actions using arms and legs. Strength, balance, coordination.

I could write about the times you beat and bewildered bar-room and chess-club champions with your unheard-of strategies.

Or I could write about your generosity and loyalty. Like the Friday night when we both lost most of our weekly wages in a game of three-card brag with the crazy Scottish guys in the ground-floor flat below us. A couple of bottles of tequila and some high-powered marijuana were involved …

We wake the next morning, hungover and stupefied. “I’m winning it back,” you say. I laugh, and am reminded of a scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. In group therapy, Nurse Rached regales the men for losing their money to McMurphy in tub-room card games. Innocently, Martini asks how they are going to win their money back. To which Nurse Rached tells them cuttingly that they’re not going to win their money back.

But you won ours back, didn’t you, Jim?

When was that? 1984?

More tequila, more marijuana. The bluffs, the skills, the steady hands and nerves, the pokerface. My instruction from you is simply to make up the numbers. Bet little, lose little, do little.

You play like a demon, and you win a lot.

Then in the darkened stairwell, on the way back up to our flat, you stop me and ask: “How much did you burn last night?” “Seventy,” I say (£70 of my weekly building-site wage of £100). You take out that fat roll of notes and you count seventy pounds into my reluctant hand, not hearing any of my protests. You’ve won back our weekly wages and more, and all is well with the world.

What can I really capture of you, Jim? Your life was so full and colourful and energetic. Perhaps what shines out most are the vendange seasons in Chablis. The sun-drenched vineyards … the work-hard-play-hard atmosphere … the camaraderie among the pickers … the quaint farmhouse in Chablis village where we petit-déjeuner’d, déjeuner’d, and dîner’d.

Like all things, it had to end.

The last time I picked grapes in France, in the mid Eighties, machines were replacing human pickers. “Cassé la machine!” we chanted as we rode in the grape trailer behind the tractor on the last day of that harvest …

Chablis. A picturesque village in the Burgundy region. So many memories … the little house in the village where we slept and partied, a house that may or may not have been haunted, a house that lay empty most of the year round, its dusty cobwebbed rooms witnessing the passing of the sun and moon at its windows, time marked by the shift and play of shadows.

I imagine it empty now, as I write this, four decades later.

We are ghosts of those times, Jim. Ghosts of Chablis.

You’ll remember how that house belonged to a local owner of vineyards, a grape farmer, a wine maker, a viticulturer, and how in late September to early October the out-of-town pickers, including ourselves, would arrive in the village. It had two rooms downstairs and two upstairs, with five or six beds to a room, some of them bunks.

We only used the house for sleeping (and partying). Meals and showering facilities were laid on at the farmhouse a short walk away. Sometimes, at night, things happened in that house. Maybe William Shatner could do one of his Weird or What? shows there, and lay the ghosts to rest by telling them soothing stories about how beautiful our planet looks from space.

Anyway, Jim, I won’t go into the "presence" in the lavatory that spooked your brother Laurie so badly … Let’s not get carried away with the supernatural. We were drunk every night anyway, and stoned. Who knows what was real?

The house is functional; its floorboards are bare and the rooms empty except for the beds — beds that are basic metal-frames with bars instead of headboards — much like the sort of beds you might find in a Victorian insane asylum.

One night, I wake in a state of terror that I’ve rarely experienced. You’re in a bed along one wall and I’m in a bed along the adjacent wall, butted up to yours at right-angles, resulting in our heads being at right-angles when we sleep (take note of that important detail).

We’d been the last awake, sitting up sharing another bottle of red. Fast forward to the dead of night. I wake in the moonlight with a claw-like hand clamped around my scalp. I scream and pull away with effort, breaking the iron grip. Your eyes are bulging at me; your hand is still outstretched in the shape of a huge claw. You don’t even look like yourself any longer. You look like — yes, why not — like a Victorian-era lunatic.

“WTF,” I say. Except we didn’t have cyber-text acronyms in those days — we didn’t even have mobile phones or the internet. So, correction — what I actually say is, “What the fuck?”

Your bulging eyes are freaking me out. You’re in a demonic trance or something. Your white tee-shirt is heavily blood-stained. The bed-sheets are soaked in blood …

No, wait. It’s red wine. You’ve spilled wine all over the place.

“Uh … what’s going on?” you say, the demonic possession or nightmare or whatever mercifully over.

***

Daytime, we labour in the vineyards. By the second evening, our backs are killing us, and all we can see when we close our eyes are bright green fluorescent bunches of grapes.

We work from 7 till 10 in the morning, then stop for the first break. Flasks of tea and coffee appear from the back of the vans and minibuses that transport us to the fields. Bizarrely, wine is available too, mid morning. We didn’t need much encouragement, did we, Jim?

Toiling through the vineyards. Three sheets to the wind. For the rest of the morning. In merry mood. Pranking one another. Us, stuffing our buckets with bunches of grapes. You, traipsing down to empty your full back-pannier into the tractor-trailer, then returning for more. The foreman telling us off for throwing grapes at one another. You, devising an acceptable compromise by flicking single grapes at out heads as we sweat among the vine rows with our secateurs.

Me, half drunk and half stoned, snipping deeply into my finger. Blood gushing forth. Not quite sure if I need stitches, but ignoring it anyway. I worry about my blood and DNA ending up in the wine, but it’ll be kept company by countless spiders and snails anyway.

You, with your single grapes. Flick, flick, flick. My irritation growing. Face. Nose. Neck. Scalp. Flick, flick, flick.

“Stop it, Jim! Stop it with those single grapes. It’s hard enough.”

You, chuckling at our irritation and misery, a chuckle that always reminds me of Dick Dastardly’s sidekick Muttley from Wacky Races.

Us pickers join forces and flick single grapes back at you. You traipse up and down with your heavy pannier, under a storm of single grapes from every direction.

“Hey, hey, hey!” says the foreman. “Merde.”

So we stop. But one of my single grapes, by some million-to-one fluke, has wedged itself in your ear, and you’re too burdened to do anything about it till you’ve emptied your pannier.

“Good one, Gus,” you say when you return, always appreciative at being outmanoeuvred in pranks and games.

How can you be gone these past fifteen years?

Time is the strangest thing of all.

And I wonder now, about that house in Chablis of so long ago: Does it remember us? Does it remember the parties and the laughter, the roaring log-fires in the grate, the greetings and goodbyes of young friends? How could we have known that we’d wander that house as ghosts ourselves one day? Ghosts of memory and dreams. Ghosts of Chablis.

What did we even know about the ways of a little conservative French village during the wine-grape harvest in the early 1980s?

I’d never before drunk coffee from a cereal bowl. Had you, Jim? But, wait, I’m forgetting how we lived and co-habited in some of our London squats. How, if we had “friends round for dinner” some of us would eat from saucepan lids if there weren’t enough plates. I’m forgetting that time when you couldn’t find a knife in the kitchen, and we all fell about laughing as you grabbed a rusty old axe from your tool kit and brought it down on the worktop with a thunking wallop to cut a cheese sandwich in half.

Coffee in a cereal bowl is normal in France. Neither had we had five-course meals for a workday lunch and tossed back glass after glass of wine as if at a wedding feast. Never before had we had the blessings of our boss as we went back to the vineyards in the afternoons, intoxicated.

Do you remember the Parisians — Jean-Michel, Alain, Marie-Claude, fresh from travels in India — who plied us, the English contingent, with high-grade hash at the back of the minibus on the way out to the vineyards? The farmer didn’t seem to mind as long as we still got the work done. And I don’t how, but we did still get the works done, and were invited back for the season year after year.

As with everything, the sad farewells must follow.

Nothing like a last-night party in the pickers’ house (which may or may not have been haunted, remember?)

“There are many spirits in this house …” says Marie-Claude. “I can feel it. Many spirits. If you wish, I can call them …”

It’s two in the morning. Only the die-hards remain. Wine bottles and joints are still being passed around. We had a fire in the grate earlier and its embers glow red. Shafts of moonlight fall through the window.

“No such thing as spirits,” says Frankie. “When you’re dead, you’re dead.”

“I believe in spirits,” you say, cracking open a bottle of Pastis. “Call ’em.”

“Don’t,” says Laurie. “Please don’t, Marie-Claude. S’il vous plaît.”

“Très bien,” she says, smiling. “Okay. I won’t.”

But she does. She tricks us.

Ten minutes later, she’s got this look on her face, and there’s a long thin glowing band trailing out of her mouth. I tremble. I rub my eyes. I’m reminded of pictures I’ve seen in Occult books — I was big into the Occult in my youth — pictures of paranormal mediums with something called ectoplasm forming in the air around them as they’re supposedly in a trance or making contact with the spirit realm. Anyway, Marie-Claude has this odd look. She’s all shadowy and spooky-looking in the moonlight. The ectoplasm is coming out of her mouth and snaking into the air …

You try to pass me the Pastis bottle for a swig, Jim, but I’m too unnerved and I can't move. Marie-Claude takes the ectoplasm in her fingers and disengages it from her mouth.

“Can you see it?” she says. “Can you see it?”

“Yes …” I say, “yes ...”

Then I blink and realise. The long band that was glowing in the moonlight is a white ribbon from her dress, and she’s saying, “Can you sit?” to somebody who’s staggering about drunkenly in the middle of the room.

***

Before we leave Chablis, to hitch-hike our way across Europe and continue our travels, the farmer leads us down into his cellars, and with great pride gives us each a bottle of his vintage premier crux.

I think we’re meant to cherish this gift, take it home to our families and maybe open it for a special occasion. But we’re young and irreverent. Anyway we don’t want the extra weight for the hard travelling ahead. We go to the local park to drink it. We don’t have a corkscrew or a Swiss-army knife between us.

“No problem,” you say, always ready with improvisations.

You use a stick to force the corks inside the bottles. Then we slug back the vintage plonk as the autumn sun goes down over Chablis. Ooh la la …

***

How can you be gone all these years, Jim?

"Who Knows Where the Time Goes?" as Sandy Denny sang.

Jim ... Jim ... I always said you were Ireland’s answer to John Belushi. And that’s how I picture you still — in some parallel universe — sitting next to Dan Ackroyd (Elwood) in the Blues Mobile.

Elwood says, “It’s six hundred kilometres to Amsterdam, we’ve got a full tank of gas and half a bottle of Chablis, it’s night and we’re wearing sunglasses.”

He revs the engine and looks at you, deadpan.

“Hit it,” you say.

***